The B-17 squadron that began to bring America back in the Pacific

Larry Thornberry November 23, 2018

It’s appropriate that I started writing this on Thanksgiving morning. We all have every reason to be thankful for the courageous Americans who stood up and did their duty during WWII, including the flyers military historian Bruce Gamble brings us in the very readable Kangaroo Squadron.......They flew the sturdy and all around commendable B-17, one of America’s reliable war horses in WWII and a character in this book almost as much men who flew them. The squadron’s name comes from the fact that these American warriors were stationed mostly in Australia in the early days of WWII, when America and her allies had few troops, few assets, and little in the way of prospects in the South Pacific.........

The Pacific didn’t get much in 1941 and 1942. But it got the Kangaroo Squadron, the members of which performed admirably while having to deal not just with a well-equipped and battle-hardened Japanese air force and navy, but with primitive conditions, tropical diseases, bad food, bad water, terrible flying weather, little in the way of the parts and maintenance their planes needed, and in the case of crews downed in New Guinea, perhaps the most hostile-to-humans environment on the planet. Most of the men whose experiences Gamble chronicles, whether or not they ever battled the Japanese, had to battle with one or more of malaria, dengue fever, dysentery, typhus, hookworm, or various skin diseases we will not linger over.

Another complicating factor and a very real danger for flyers in the Pacific campaign was the sheer size of this huge ocean which covers a quarter of the planet’s surface. Navigation was a much more primitive art in those days. No global positioning systems to exactly pinpoint where an aircraft is in relation to where it’s going. Flyers had to rely on a navigator, hopefully well trained, with charts and an instrument to “shoot the stars” (if it wasn’t daytime or too cloudy). Crossing thousands of miles of ocean, the navigator’s position estimate couldn’t be verified until a landmark could be seen. And guess how many landmarks there are in thousands of square miles of ocean in which navigators hoped to find their way to the tiny islands that were their destinations. God had to be looking over those who made it...........To Read More.....

Kangaroo Squadron: American Courage in the Darkest Days of World War II
By Bruce Gamble (Da Capo Press, 400 pages, $28)